It’s sad that one of the victims of the deep diving submersible Titan was only 19 years old. If he had wanted a real adventure, someone noted, he should have stayed on dry land and lived his ordinary life.

Five passengers spent nearly a million dollars (collectively) to gaze through a porthole at the sunken ship Titanic. Some influential people are calling the expedition pointless and wonder why anyone would go through the great expense and obvious danger just to see a corroded ruin. But I get it.

And part of the reason I get it is because in 2003, I interviewed the first pilot of the submersible submarine Alvin that took scientist Robert Ballard down to the ocean floor to find the Titanic. The Alvin was an expertly constructed submersible created by scientists and engineeers at the infamous Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. More than 14,000 scientists benefitted from the Alvin, and nearly all of the dives were scientific, garnering the field of science new and vast knowledge of the ocean floor.

I was writing for a magazine called “Inside Cape Cod” back then and interviewing submersible pilot Dudley Foster was a career highlight. He had deep blue eyes like the sea and was a true science cowboy. He was piloting Alvin during some of the worlds most amazing underwater discoveries, including the dive that discovered the Titanic.

“That particular dive was fraught with problems,” he told me. “Robert Ballard, the expedition leader, knew where the Titanic was, or where it was supposed to be, but the sonar broke and we started having problems with the submarine’s batteries. We were debating whether to abort the dive and just about that time we saw this huge black wall coming up in front of us, which was the hull.”

Foster explained one “spooky part” of the dive, which involved sending Jason Jr., an unmanned robotic vehicle quipped with a camera, down the grand staircase of the ship. “In order to do that, I had to set Alvin down on the top deck. To get near the staircase, you can’t see straight down, and Alvin’s nose was hanging over this big chasm. I was thinking about whether the deck would cave in.”

The biggest danger to any dive on Alvin is entanglement on the bottom. If they were to get stuck and were unable to free the sub, they would become a bit of Titanic history themselves. Titanic is so far from land and so deep that there would be no real chance of rescue. Foster had a lot on his mind and did not have the luxury of waxing romantic about the Titanic at the time.

Foster’s days at WHOI began as a mechanic for Alvin, but within three years he began to pilot the navy-owned sub and eventually became an expedition leader on various deep-sea projects. In 1997, while on a geographical expedition in the Galapagos, the team came upon an amazing discovery: the presence of unusual sea life on the ocean floor and never before seen hydrothermal vents spewing out super-heated water. “We weren’t expecting this oasis of biology so deep in the sea,” Foster said. ” The deeper you dive, the fewer the variety of sea life you come across. But here was this abundance of life, and much of it never seen before: clams that were 14 to 18 inches long, and 8 foot long tube worms. We couldn’t help but fantasize that we had discovered some giant ancient habitat where dinosaurs existed and were living here still.”

Hydrothermal vents are found along a global undersea mountain range alive with volcanoes and earthquakes. Super-heated water spews from the vents, and communities of sea creatures thrive near them, using the chemicals spewing from the vents, rather than sunlight, to live. The discovery of these vents by the WHOI team changed some basic theories scientists held about life, since until this point it was assumed that all life required sunlight to evolve and survive.

Days in the pilot seat are intense–and sometimes dangerous. Once the 23-foot, 35,200-pound sub became tangled in a cable of instruments strung on the seafloor by a previous expedition. A few calculations assured Dudley that Alvin was powerful and buoyant enough to carry the sub and its dangerous load to the surface.

While most pilots stay an average of five years, Dudley, now retired, remained dedicated to deep-sea science for more than three decades. “The months of seven-day work weeks are physically wearing, but the excitement of seeing a small portion of the Earth never seen before, or possibly ever again, keeps me looking forward to my next day at the bottom of the sea.”

On more than 530 dives, Dudley explored undersea canyons, those super-heated vents, and, of course, the ill-fated Titanic. The vehicle’s mechanical arm is “like an extension of me,” Dudley told another publication. “I wear the sub as part of my body.”

I’d like to get in touch with Foster again and get his read on the OceanGate disaster. He’s retired and still living on Cape Cod, now a piece of history himself.